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Link Building: Asking for links versus building links

I am currently delving into link building for SEO having started out from a social media marketing side. From that angle, it was always my belief building high quality links came from engaging targeted bloggers and sites in my market and related verticals for product reviews and/or providing expert advise and opinion for posts they are creating.

As I am learning more the "technical" side of SEO, I've read a lot of posters on here talk about asking from links from websites. While I get the concept from a strategic stand point, are links really asking for or is better to continue to pursue the long term investment of pitching to get coverage from well known bloggers and sites?

5 Responses

I like the way you are thinking... there are different approaches to linkbuilding.

I believe that different types of linkbuilding work differently for different types of websites, different types of people and different types of relationshiops.

One of the most important things to consider is the value of content on the site. If you have kickass content it can be easy to get links. Just share it via facebook, twitter, slashdot, reddit, stumble upon and the people who encounter it will pass it along to their friends/followers/ etc and some links will develop as a result. Invest in great content and your linkbuilding efforts will can be easy - but your content needs to be best-on-the-web superior stuff. Most people are unable or unwilling to produce this in quantity. This type of linkbuilding really scales because it takes no effort from you. Other people do it for you.

Once your content declines in value then you enter the "asking for links" and "building links" realms.... they are not "gifts" any more. Now you gotta work for almost every one of them, the links are not as juicy and the very best links are impossible to get. These types of links can be one-way if you have decent but not superior content. You just have to ask enough people and a few of them will link to you - as long as you have something respect able for them to link to - and you have to confine your asking to sites that are willing to link out.

Another category of links is "relationships" such as you are a member of a business group, a civic group, a tenant in a building and the landlord links to you, a donor to a library, a business in a specific town, a graduate from a school or department, or maybe your mom will link to you from her blog. :-) These usually have nothing to do with your content and they will link to you as long as your site is not embarrassing.

Once your content and relationships decline in value to the point that nobody is really excited about you linkbuilding becomes a simple transaction...

There is a "fair trade" economy where I give you an article and you accept that content in exchange for allowing my links to remain in it.

There is a "favor economy" where you trade links, trade blog posts, etc. Nobody cares about your content they just want a link somewhere on your site.

Then comes the "purchase economy" where you pay people to link to your site.

I try to operate at the top of this list. I want to create assets on my site that people will link to because the transactions on the lower part of the list are very time consuming and expensive. The cost to scale is very high.

Asking for links is usually a inefficient tactic because the incentives do not outweigh the costs. In Dale Carnegie's classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People he suggests thinking in terms of what other people want, not what you want. If you provide a strong enough incentive, asking for links can work. For example, the ego hook can be highly effective. If you put bloggers on a list as one of the top bloggers in their industry or interview them, they have a strong incentive to link to you.

It is worth more effort to go for the long term relationships with respected bloggers and sites. Asking for a backlink from a webmaster is practically dead. I mean it is a numbers game and the more people you straight up ask, the better chance that you will get a few here and there. However, by building up a relationship with a blogger or site you have something meaningful over time that will produce more fruitage. Sometimes by contacting a prominent blog ahead of a release of a good piece of content you can build anticipation and get them to take your piece on by generating more perceived value in their eye, and thus getting you a good link. Hope that helps!

Reading all the information buzzing around on Google and social markers, I would think that fewer bog entries and tweets from better sources or related sources would be better in the long run. One thing Google seems to be doing at the moment is biasing keyword searches to social metrics, if you are logged in and your network is active on the topic. We have been able to move keywords rapidly up in rank by contributing to blogs and doing guest articles in our targeted market.

With the last couple of rollouts by google to reduce rank of low quality sites, relevance of content and links is becoming more important. Rand has a slideshow that illustrates how search engines have evolved.

We don't do link requests, we do content requests. Thinking what a web master wants, we can write and deliver content for them. A guest blog is an excellent example, but there are many other content suggestions you can make. A half page glowing testimonial about there services will often get published. A tips page related to what they do might be very helpful for them.

Think like the web master, be there friend, an the links and citation will follow.

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